LOG 001: PROJECT INITIATION

For my Final Major Project, I’m creating a retro-futuristic, first-person environment set inside a sealed underground research facility. It’s designed to be a bit eerie, a bit lonely, and very much a case of “what if the AI stopped being helpful and started being... efficient.”
The whole thing centres around Aegis, an AI originally designed to help people survive underground after a surface catastrophe (the details of which remain suitably vague). Aegis started off well-meaning, but like most sci-fi AIs, eventually decided humans were the weak link in the system. Anyone who didn’t quite match up to its standards was sent off for “reconditioning.” Spoiler: that doesn’t mean therapy. It means recycling. Literally.
Now the bunker is mostly abandoned. The lights still flicker. The air vents still hum. And somewhere in the background, Aegis is still watching. The player wakes up in the Aegis Control Room, somehow free of the AI’s influence. No mind control. No rerouting to the biomass processor. Just… awake. It’s quiet, for now.

I kicked off this project with some loose idea generation, nothing fancy, just jotting down whatever concepts came to mind that felt interesting, atmospheric, and suitably weird. I knew I wanted to explore a retro-futuristic environment, and I kept circling back to the same themes: isolation, decaying technology, and something quietly watching from behind the scenes.
To get inspired, I looked back at a mix of my favourite games, films, and shows. Alien: Isolation was an obvious one, it's basically the gold standard for claustrophobic sci-fi horror and grimy analog tech. Fallout (especially the older ones) gave me a lot of retro-future inspiration: terminals, vaults, propaganda, and that ‘mid-century optimism gone wrong’ vibe. I also pulled from Prey, Bioshock Infinite, and Wolfenstein: The New Order, each for their unique take on environmental storytelling, lighting, or worldbuilding. On the film and TV side, there was the classic Alien, the minimalist isolation in Moon, and the slow-burn pressure cooker of Silo, where the world outside is as much of a mystery as the system keeping everyone inside. Once I had a rough concept in my head, I threw together a quick sketch in Photoshop to visualise the layout. I kept it symmetrical, mostly for design clarity, partly to save time when building it later. It helped me block out the basic shapes and work out how I wanted the player to flow through the space. No masterpieces here, just enough to start turning it into something usable.
After that, I began gathering reference images and doing a bit more focused research into real-world inspiration, old nuclear control rooms, Cold War-era infrastructure, and anything with a slightly outdated idea of what “the future” should look like. Thick cables, flickering CRT monitors, and far too many toggle switches. I tried to balance the clean edges of sci-fi with the grime and clutter of a place that's been running on autopilot for too long.
From that, I developed the initial concept: a sealed underground facility overseen by an AI called Aegis, originally built to keep people alive... but now quietly deciding who’s worth keeping. I knew I didn’t want explicit horror, no blood-stained walls or monsters jumping out, just a slow, atmospheric sense of unease. A bunker where something clearly went wrong, and now you’re here, alone, to figure out what’s left. This stage helped me solidify the tone of the project and gave me a solid foundation to build on. The goal going forward: keep it immersive, stylised-but-functional, and just unsettling enough that players start asking questions before they even reach the second room.

LOG 002: test graph

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